Does America Need A Heart Attack Moment?

Most people with terrible habits, like smoking, eating too much, drinking too much, usually have a tough time kicking that habit. For example, imagine an overweight smoker, who goes to the doctor for a checkup, year after year, gets told over and over again to lose weight and stop smoking, otherwise they will die. However, year after year, they continue in the same pattern, and get told the same thing, year after year. They never change.

But then, some major cataclysmic event hits their life: a good friend dies suddenly, or they have a heart attack and survive. This major event is a wake up call, and all of a sudden they are motivated to change. They go on a diet, lose weight, stop smoking, exercise, suddenly, after this heart attack moment, they realize they need to drastically change, in the same way that their doctor had been telling them to change for the longest time.

But they absolutely needed that heart attack moment in order to change. Without that heart attack moment, they would have just continued doing what they were doing until they DID die of a heart attack one day, probably much sooner that expected.

So this is America. We are fiscally overweight, can barely walk, are finding it difficult to do things, and we can’t cut our addiction to spending. We’ve been told over and over what we need to do in order to get healthy, but year after year, we don’t do it.

Sometimes I think that elections are heart attack moments for this country, but most of the time we are switching out one boss for another boss, who is the same as the old boss. 9/11 was a heart attack moment for America, and we changed the way we do security and since then we’ve had no major incidents.

So my question is: can we change fiscally unless we have a fiscal heart attack moment? And what kind of heart attack moment could happen in order for us to change fiscally, at least enough so that we can survive. Some could argue that we’ve already had our heart attack moment, but if you ask me, unless it shakes almost all Americans down to their very core, like 9/11 did, then I don’t see much fiscal change in future.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wishing for some financial calamity, but I’m increasingly thinking that without one, we’ll be just like that overweight patient: constantly being told to do something, and never doing it, until we die of a massive heart attack.